Charged by the Wind
Wind-powered battery chargers provided cheap energy before rural electricity
By Leslie McManus
Eighty years ago, isolation was the bittersweet hallmark of rural life. No telephones. No television. No e-mail. No electricity. When the vacuum tube radio became affordable in the early 1920s, farm families suddenly had access to daily news and market reports - until the wet-cell batteries died. If the family was affluent enough to own a gas-powered generator, they simply recharged the batteries. Otherwise, just as suddenly, the silence returned.
With necessity acting as the mother of invention, the Wincharger was born in 1927. Developed by brothers John and Gerhard Albers on their farm in Cherokee, Iowa, the first Wincharger wind-powered battery charger was used to recharge a 6-volt storage battery for a vacuum tube radio.
The new source of free energy was an almost overnight commercial success, embraced by cash-strapped farm families who couldn't afford a back-up battery. Before the Wincharger, when the radio's battery was drained, it had to be hauled to town and left for a few days at an auto repair shop to be recharged by a gas-powered generator. The Wincharger changed all that.
"The more affluent farmer had 32-volt appliances in his house, like refrigerators and vacuums," says David Ballinger, a Wincharger collector from Burlington, Iowa. "Those were mostly powered by gas-powered units - Delco generators, for instance - but he needed a supplemental source."
The fledgling Iowa company found a strong partner in 1935, when the Zenith Corp. purchased a controlling interest in the company. Zenith immediately implemented an aggressive advertising campaign, offering Zenith radio buyers steep discounts on 6-volt Winchargers. In 1937, Zenith Radio Corp. purchased the remaining shares of Wincharger stock. To provide additional lighting capacity, 12-, 32- and 110-volt generators were developed. Zenith continued with the Wincharger line until 1968.
In the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in the Midwest and on both coasts, wind-powered battery chargers were in hot demand. International markets also opened up. In Holland, for instance, Winchargers and similar, homemade devices were commonly used to generate electricity for home and farm use during the German occupation of World War II.
In Wincharger's first 10 years, which included the Great Depression, the company sold 750,000 units worldwide. Other manufacturers were quick to follow Wincharger's lead. Makers such as Aerodyne, Aircharger, Air Electric, Airlite, Air-Way, Allied, Hebco, Jacobs, Kelco, Nelson, Parris-Dunn, ParMark, Perkins, Ruralite, Universal, Wind Power, and Wind Wing were scattered across the country.
With implementation of the Rural Electrification Act in 1936, however, the wind-powered battery charger's days were numbered. Even the most remote farms had access to electricity by the mid-1950s, ending the need for the wind generator and a free energy source. Many utility companies refused to provide power to farms with working wind generators, and more than a few Winchargers were deliberately disabled by high-powered rifles.
Although the primary rural market for Winchargers dried up by the mid-1950s, 12-volt units targeted for use in extremely remote areas and Third World countries were produced until 1982. Wincharger (now operating under the name of Winco) remains in operation as a Minnesota-based manufacturer of home, construction, and industrial generators.